You don’t, however, have to be a Portland-dwelling “local and organic“ nut to believe it would be no bad thing if more of us consumed food from closer to home, thus supporting local producers and small businesses and encouraging farmers who promote higher standards of welfare for the animals we eat. We’d also get fresher and tastier food into the bargain. Polls in Britain have indicated that a sizeable minority of shoppers are indeed changing their buying habits, and will be reacquainting themselves with their local butcher (if he’s still in business) rather than buying processed meat products from the big supermarkets.

Only time will tell if it’s a real change in attitudes rather than a knee-jerk response, but it’s a reminder of how the free market can work at its best: consumers punish companies that don’t provide a decent product by taking their business elsewhere.

Mike McNally is a journalist based in Bath, England. He posts at PJ Tatler and at his own blog Monkey Tennis, and tweets at @notoserfdom. When he's not writing about politics he writes about Photoshop.

It reminds me of Hurricane Katrina. As long as people could build their homes wherever they wanted to, people in New Orleans built houses on high ground. Along came the government, with all of its regulators and experts, which said: you can only build your houses where we approve and yes, the well-connected developers who got the corps of engineers to drain the swamps of New Orleans East are approved to sell their houses, but no, you may not build on the high ground because you do not have the proper permits.

In The Black Obelisk (which I heartily recommend as an insight on how that guy rose to power) Erich Maria Remarque chose as the typical, honest , hardworking German dealing with hyperinflation a horse butcher. It seems to have been a respectable occupation, at least between the wars.

In our time we don't know when we are eating gene manipulated meat or vegetables. I think it's a bigger problem. It's a shame. Because if the horse can be beef, or a rabbit maybe cat (who knows? i've heard, that they are almost similar), then the gene manipulated corn, or tomato are not the same tomato or corn as we knew them.

I would say the likelihood of this effecting a long-term in British dietary and purchasing habits is virtually zero. The overwhelmingly dominant driver is price, and the large chains have an unbeatable advantage over smaller producers there. What people say they are going to do in the wake of these revelations and what they actually do will probably be very different things. 'Revealed preferences' will lend the lie to any pious locavore notions of buying more expensive food from artisanal sources.

horse meat is not unhealthy per se, but many horses (especially race horses and show horses) are given massive doses of growth hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals that make their way into the meat, causing it to become unfit for homan consumption.

But quite apart from that the problem is, like with the US fish scandal that's ongoing, that the products are mislabeled. And in many countries, that people are sold cheap horsemeat as expensive beef (beef can cost 2-3 times as much as horse in the EU).Hence the fraud investigations, not public health and safety.

I see that as just a progression of the same inclinations that people have in developing emotional ideas regarding pigs or something - specifically when they are not in direct contact with the animals being raised for meat.

I blame Disney...but anyway....

Horses, like cows, are livestock. Useful livestock, to be sure, but still livestock.

I mean, I grew up in a rural area and I've eaten fish, fowl, cow, sheep, pig, deer, bear, snake, alligator.....what makes a horse so special?

Oh, and I've eaten horse too....

The only question in my mind is where are the slaughterhouses getting the horses from?

I would think anyone who saw their horse as a pet would have greater love for them than to send them off to a slaughterhouse when they outlived their usefulness. Aside from any contamination from drugs, that is the thing about this story that's bothersome to me.

In my opinion, if people don't like the idea of eating Trigger, then don't order it off of the menu - but I agree at the same time that the menu SHOULD accurately reflect what is actually being served.